What boosts does the Xbox One S hide? According to Digital Foundry, quite a few. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

The Xbox One S is out, and our review discusses at length some of the system’s major changes, including a total visual refresh and a test of its 4K content. Turns out we missed one thing: the system launched with an unadvertised boost to some older games’ visuals!

The frame rate-analysis wizards at Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry confirmed the good news after testing older Xbox One games. Many titles won’t seen any boost at all—which is what we found in cursory testing of 15 games, both for the normal system and for its backwards-compatibility library. However, if an older game runs on Xbox One S using either unlocked frame rates (meaning, not tied to v-sync) or dynamic resolution (meaning, it can scale down from 1080p on the fly to improve performance), players might see the a boost by as much as nine frames per second.

That maximum boost was measured in Project CARS, a graphics-intensive driving sim whose rain-soaked racetrack variants can bring frame rates hurtling downward on the normal Xbox One. Other games that enjoyed noticeable boosts included a remaster of Capcom’s Resident Evil 5 and the latest game in the Hitman series.